The present disclosure relates to nurse call systems and particularly, to nurse call systems having the capability to couple to medical devices to receive generic alarm signals from the medical devices. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to configuring nurse call systems by caregivers.
Nurse call systems used in healthcare facilities are known. Some nurse call systems are equipped to receive alarm signals from medical equipment which couple to equipment ports provided in a hospital room, for example. Oftentimes, the alarms from the medical equipment are displayed at a master station as a generic alarm. The alarm is considered to be generic if there is no information about the type of alarm that is occurring or the type of medical equipment which is generating the alarm.
Some prior art nurse call systems permit maintenance technicians to make selections as to the types of alarms or equipment that are associated with particular alarms using a system configuration computer, such as a server. The server saves the configuration in a database and a subset of the database then gets transferred to other computer devices of the nurse call system. However, this manner of configuring the alarm or device types in a nurse call system is less than ideal because it requires the maintenance technician to reconfigure the system if any of the medical devices are disconnected from the system and replaced with a different type of device.
Other prior art nurse call systems permit a master station of the nurse call system to be used to configure alarm or device types for the equipment that is coupled to the nurse call system. However, configuring the alarm or device types at the master station is time consuming and either requires caregivers to coordinate with one another to set up the configuration or requires a caregiver that hooks up a piece of medical equipment in a room to walk to the master station to set up the alarm or device type on the master station computer. What is needed is an easier and more flexible way for caregivers to configure alarm or device types in a nurse call system.